Constant exposure to violence begets more violence. From Caitlin Johnstone at medium.com:

Ahh, the day after a high-profile mass shooting in America: the only time Republicans will ever pretend to care about the mentally ill.

A man, pictured above, killed twelve people with a gun at a California bar yesterday, then turned the gun on himself bringing the total number of dead to thirteen. Like a disproportionately high number of mass shooters in the US, he served in the military. He reportedly suffered from PTSD as a result of his experiences in Afghanistan with the US Marines. America’s war in Afghanistan is the longest war in US history.

The US medical system is at least half socialized, well on its way to full socialized medicine. From Ryan McMaken at mises.org:

US states continue to expand Medicaid, and it’s happening even in so-called “red states.” CNBC, for instance, reports how voters in “red states” Utah, Nebraska, and Idaho all approved ballot issues to expand Medicaid under new Obamacare provisions. Meanwhile, the voters in these states also handed control of state government to Republican governors and legislators.

At the state level at least, the expansion of government healthcare has now become pretty much a given in nearly all states outside of the South.

It continues to be a big issue in state-level elections, such as in Colorado, where the Republican candidate — who lost the election — spent much of his campaign condemning expansion of “government-run” healthcare.

But let’s face it. A great many voters, whether Republican or Democrat, want to hear the magic words “safety net” when it comes to health care. This is why even voters in Idaho, voted to — as they saw it — expand the healthcare safety net.

This is an excellent article about the history of the opioid epidemic. From Chris McNeal at theguardian.com:

When high doses of painkillers led to widespread addiction, it was called one of the biggest mistakes in modern medicine. But this was no accident.

Jane Ballantyne was, at one time, a true believer. The British-born doctor, who trained as an anaesthetist on the NHS before her appointment to head the pain department at Harvard and its associated hospital, drank up the promise of opioid painkillers – drugs such as morphine and methadone – in the late 1990s. Ballantyne listened to the evangelists among her colleagues who painted the drugs as magic bullets against the scourge of chronic pain blighting millions of American lives. Doctors such as Russell Portenoy at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York saw how effective morphine was in easing the pain of dying cancer patients thanks to the hospice movement that came out of the UK in the 1970s.

Why, the new thinking went, could the same opioids not be made to work for people grappling with the physical and mental toll of debilitating pain from arthritis, wrecked knees and bodies worn out by physically demanding jobs? As Portenoy saw it, opiates were effective painkillers through most of recorded history and it was only outdated fears about addiction that prevented the drugs still playing that role.

Opioids were languishing from the legacy of an earlier epidemic that prompted President Theodore Roosevelt to appoint the US’s first opium commissioner, Dr Hamilton Wright, in 1908. Portenoy wanted to liberate them from this taint. Wright described Americans as “the greatest drug fiends in the world”, and opium and morphine as a “national curse”. After that the medical profession treated opioid pain relief with what Portenoy and his colleagues regarded as unwarranted fear, stigmatising a valuable medicine.

These new evangelists painted a picture of a nation awash in chronic pain that could be relieved if only the medical profession would overcome its prejudices. They constructed a web of claims they said were rooted in science to back their case, including an assertion that the risk of addiction from narcotic painkillers was “less than 1%” and that dosages could be increased without limit until the pain was overcome. But the evidence was, at best, thin and in time would not stand up to detailed scrutiny. One theory, promoted by Dr David Haddox, was that patients genuinely experiencing pain could not become addicted to opioids because the pain neutralised the euphoria caused by the narcotic. He said that what looked to prescribing doctors like a patient hooked on the drug was “pseudo-addiction”.

Not surprisingly, Smith’s answer is: just another distraction. From Smith at oftwominds.com:

The problem isn’t polarization; the problem is neither flavor of the status quo is actually solving any of the nation’s most pressing system problems.

As I write this at 5 pm (Left Coast) November 6, the election results are unknown. While various media are trumpeting this as “the most important election of our lives,” the less eyeball-catching, emotion-triggering reality is this election is nothing but another distraction. No matter who “wins,” none of our systemic problems will be addressed, much less solved.

Does either party have the will or coherent grasp of what’s broken to fix America’s healthcare mess? No. The Democrats’ “solution” is to take the bloated, ineffective Medicare system that incentivizes blatant fraud, overbilling and profiteering and increase the sickcare cartels’ power and profits via “Medicare for All.”

This is akin to giving defense contractors the power to set the Pentagon budget. Oh, wait, they already have that power.

In the exact same fashion, Medicare’s soaring budget is set by profiteering’ cartels. Nothing will change in “Medicare for All” except taxes will go up and the cartels will skim additional billions in rentier profits.

The Republican solution is to call quasi-monopolies and cartels “markets.”Since turning everything into a market solves all problems, that’s the “market-based “solution.” But since healthcare is run by cartels, which fix the “market” to their own benefit, there really is no “market” in healthcare, and nobody’s interested in establishing one because that would crater cartel profits.

How about a systemic solution for opioid addiction? If you believe either party has a solution,” you need to reduce your Ibogaine intake. Opioids and other addictions (like social media and mobile phones) are immensely profitable and so the cartels and monopolies profiting from addictions fund politicos in both parties to insure their profits aren’t reduced.

How about a dysfunctional weapons procurement system? Both parties love trillion-dollar weapons programs as long as the money sluices into enough Congressional districts. So what if the weapon system is defective, already outdated, poorly designed, the wrong system for the challenges ahead or simply not cost-effective– as long as the campaign contributions are gushing into D.C. and politicos can brag about “jobs” created by building failed weaponry, nothing will change. The Pentagon can beg Congress to stop building the darn thing and the Pentagon will be ignored: there’s simply too much money at stake to care whether it actually serves military needs.

How about soaring debt loads on every sector of the economy? Money that goes to pay interest can’t be invested or spent elsewhere, and that starves the economy of productive investment. The super-wealthy own much of the debt and receive much of the interest income. This is a systemic problem that isn’t viewed as a problem because the super-wealthy own the political process.

The “solution” to crushing student loan debt ($1.4 trillion and counting) is to transfer the entire debt to the taxpayers, meaning the federal government issues another $1.4 trillion in debt to pay the super-wealthy who own all the student loans. Nice for the super-wealthy and politicos, not so nice for future taxpayers burdened with trillions more in debt.

Neither party can accept that higher education is a failed, dysfunctional system. And so the “solution” is borrow another couple trillion and pay interest to the super-wealthy who own the debt, all for an “education” that often has little value in either the economy or the debt-serf students’ lives.

The problem isn’t polarization; the problem is neither flavor of the status quo is actually solving any of the nation’s most pressing system problems. This is why we’re coming apart at the seams: problems are being left unaddressed and so they only become more entrenched and destructive.

IN BRIEF

The Facts:Dr. Judy A. Mikovits, PhD, was thrown in prison after she refused to discredit her own research that led to the discovery that deadly retroviruses have been transmitted to 25 million Americans through vaccines.

Reflect On:What is the role of the Awakening Community in honoring and protecting courageous whistleblowers who risk their lives and careers to stand in their truth?

If you have been following stories in recent years of scientists and researchers who make discoveries that are threatening to the Deep State and the bottom line of Big Pharma, you will have seen the pattern before. Those doctors are often ‘persuaded’ to recant their studies, offered bribes or other benefits to distance themselves from or even destroy their data, and even threatened with jail time or, if a legal case is too difficult to fabricate against them, they may simply be killed.

Such is the tale of molecular biologist Judy A. Mikovits, PhD, in the disturbing true story first detailed in this Natural News article that included the video below of how she was thrown in prison for research that led to the discovery that deadly retroviruses have been transmitted to twenty-five million Americans through human vaccines.

The Democrats are on the wrong side of what the public perceives as the two most important issues: health care and immigration. From Philip M. Giraldi at strategic-culture.org:

Some political observers in the United States are saying that next week’s midterm voting for seats in the Senate and House of Representatives as well as a number of governorships is the most important national election since those in 1968 and 1980. The 1968 voting saw a “law and order” Richard Nixon win the presidency in a rebuke to Lyndon Johnson’s “soft” handling of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements while Ronald Reagan won in 1980 at a time of economic turmoil, in part running on a similar “get-tough” platform to replace the seemingly hapless and indecisive Jimmy Carter.

In both 1968 and 1980 the election produced a decisive turn in direction by government, leading eventually to an end of the Vietnam War by Nixon and a more assertive foreign policy by Reagan. Though the upcoming election is midterm rather than a presidential, those who are seeing it as important hope that flipping control of the two houses of congress will check President Donald Trump and force him to change course in a number of areas. The election is, in fact, an accountability moment for Trump’s policies as seen by the American public. If there is a blue wave in congress and in the governorships, Trump will inevitably have to take notice and his impeachment becomes a real possibility.

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